February 11, 2003                                                       Confidential and Proprietary

 

Guerrilla Marketing and Return on Investment Model

For

www.taylor-irving.com

 

Repeat after me:

“Taylor-Irving is the best interior design shop, ever.”

 

Taylor-Irving and Associates Inc. is a mid size interior design firm in Ottawa, Canada with 13 employees.

 

They have been in business for 21 years during which time, most of their clients have been government ones. While continuing to focus on their core clients (Federal and Municipal governments), they feel that they need to expand their client base. After 21 years of doing next-to-nothing in terms of marketing (they have relied on ‘organic’ growth—they started very small and grew as their client base grew, mostly by word-of-mouth), how do they do that?

 

Here is their guerrilla marketing program:

 

  1. They need to identify the prospective markets (the ‘verticals’) they want to go after.
  2. They decide on pursuing:
  1. legal firms (where they have some experience);
  2. medical firms;
  3. dental firms;
  4. commercial office space users;
  5. commercial office space developers
  1. They need to use Guerrilla Marketing techniques to make their marketing budget go further.
  2. They realize that marketing cannot just be a one, two or three month effort—successful marketing requires consistent application of effort cleverly focused on the right sectors over long periods of time.
  3. They ask: “What are the early warning signs that a client might need interior design services soon?”
  4. They come up with a list of things they need to be on the lookout for:
  1. end dates for lease terms (they are going to contact potential clients at least 6 to 12 months prior to their end dates);
  2. buildings that have recently sold;
  3. their network of suppliers and contractors, who are like an early warning radar network, should tell them when people are moving or planning to move;
  4. VC announcements (folks who just got a whack of VC money tend to spend some of it on new digs and new F, F &E and, hence, interior design too);
  5. furniture and office equipment stores (future alliance partners) are also early indicators of fast growing businesses;
  6. architecture firms often know clients who need interior design assistance (although most architects seem to feel that they can do it all themselves);
  7. new startups announced by media release or covered in the press;
  8. checking the careers section of the daily newspapers to see who is hiring and be willing to take on the remodeling job for that new VP’s (of Biz Dev) office; they’ll take the smaller contracts so they will be in position to get the big jobs next time;
  9. new construction announcements and issuance of building permits;
  10. they will tie up with a number of commercial office leasing agents too.
  1. They will write down entries from directories in office buildings and then survey these people by telephone; one of the questions they will ask is: “When is your lease up?” They will use political cover in their survey including questions about what folks are looking for in terms of location and other office space variables.
  2. They will try to get ‘the worm in the apple’ (to eat the juicy fruit inside the tough skin) two ways—ride in with clients or have the developers recommend them.
  3. To that end, they will direct sell to developers—by cold or warm calling them, the latter using the six degrees of separation to make introductions.
  4. They also realize that they need to be able to demonstrate to potential clients what their ‘pixie dust’ is; what makes Taylor-Irving special.
  5. They determine that their pixie dust is that: they know how to pack in more people per square meter of office space than their competitors and still give the end users (the Dilbertesque cubicle dwellers) a satisfactory experience.
  6. They now realize that they can provide prospective clients with complete solutions where return on investment can be measured. This is extremely important to clients—everyone seems to be value conscious these days.
  7. If you can show a client that an extra $10m in design for that new museum will bring in an extra 2 million visitors per year (at a $10 admission each), well, it is easy to see how a client, even a government client, might be cajoled to spend the extra funds.
  8. That is, if they can show that for every $15,000 invested in Taylor-Irving design, they can increase yield (i.e., the number of offices or workers per unit of floor space), then this will have bottom line effects for not only the developer (who can retain expanding clients longer by showing them how to redevelop their existing space to contain more employees) but for the developer’s clients who can reduce their space needs accordingly.
  9. They will study models like that used for ‘solution selling’ in other industries to learn how to measure ROI for clients in their industry. E.g.,
    1. http://www.dramatispersonae.org/GuerrillaMarketingAndFinance/SolutionSellingTomSmithToyotaExample.htm
    2. http://www.dramatispersonae.org/GuerrillaMarketingAndFinance/SolutionSellingLawFirmExample.htm
  10. They will develop their own ROI model so that they will be able to sit with clients and change the paradigm. The three questions that they are always asked by clients are: i. Show me the design, ii. How much does it cost, iii. That’s too much, how can you cut the budget?
  11. Now they will change the paradigm to show their design, show how much it costs and then show how much they have saved the client or how much additional value they have created for the client by more efficient or clever uses of space. The emphasis will be on the value created rather than a simple focus on costs.
  12.  They will make all their designers part of the sales team together with all their suppliers—everyone will feed existing clients and potential new clients into one email data base.
  13. They will start a Taylor-Irving newsletter using their own permission based email list.
  14. The newsletter will be quarterly.
  15. Everyone they and their network of suppliers come into contact with will be asked for their permission to be added to the newsletter list.
  16. They will issue their first media release in 21 years and do some market-by-press-release for the first time in their history. They do (and have done) a lot of good, interesting work and now, they will want to be seen to be doing good work too.
  17. Some sample press releases are up at:
    1. http://www.dramatispersonae.org/MediaReleases/NORTHPOLENET.htm
    2. http://www.exploriem.org/SaundersFarm.pdf
    3. http://www.exploriem.org/FedericosGondolasMediaRelease.pdf
  18. They will join networking organizations like BOMA (Building Owners and Managers Association) and Exploriem.org—the former to get acquainted with the developer side of the business and the latter to be tied into the entrepreneur community. Joining BOMA should also get them closer to building managers too not just owners and developers. They plan to attend a lot of networking meetings for both organizations.
  19. They will test their business model using a scoring system located at: http://www.dramatispersonae.org/BusinessModels/Business%20Model%20Scoring%20Machine!.htm
  20. They won’t forget the simplest approach either—direct selling using sources as basic as the ‘Yellow Pages’ for leads in their selected verticals.

 

Copyright. Dr. Bruce M. Firestone, Ottawa, Canada. 2003

 

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